Friday, 28 June 2013

Note: I read 11.22.63 (note the title wasn't reordered for British audiences, yet they seemed to buy and read the book without undue perplexity) while writing an essay on the literature of the JFK assassination for BBC Radio 4's Open Book programme. It will be broadcast Sunday (30 June) at 4pm, and repeated on Thursday, which coincidentally is the 4th of July. It should be available on IPlayer. I'll also post the essay itself after the programmes have aired.

It's not surprising
Stephen King should approach John Kennedy's assassination through
time-travel; one of King's recurring themes is a nostalgia for a more
innocent America. His use of the time travel device to alter history
is not a new one; in fact, at its best 11.22.63 feels like a
particularly good Twilight Zone episode, the kind the late Richard
Matheson, one of King's heroes, might have written, and indeed it
carries some of the same themes as Harlan Ellison's City On The Edge
Of Forever from Star Trek. Having said that, inevitably as a JFK
killing novel it disappoints.

Jake Epping is a
recently divorced school teacher in Maine, who is recruited to time
-travel by Al, the dying owner of a local diner, who has discovered a
portal back to 1958, and who wants to prevent Lee Harvey Oswald from
killing JFK five years later. Since you come back from your journey
only minutes older, regardless of how long you've stayed in the past,
this is possible—but because he is dying before he's become
absolutely sure of Oswald's guilt, Al needs Jake, with no ties to the
present, to do the job for him.

The novel is really
Jake's story, not Kennedy's, and it's a very good one. I compared it
to the Twilight Zone but there is one difference—at 700-plus pages,
King's novel lacks the economy of a TV script. Jake's dry runs,
trying to alter the history of a local killing, and his romance in
the past, are King at his best—his strongest point may be in
subjecting human emotions to the relentless twists of fate—and his
prose, while occasionally digressive, moves forward. Because this is
time travel the reader needs to allow some slack for repetition: form
follows function and seeing the same story from slightly different
angles reinforces our sense of time as a dimension, if not an entity
of its own (which King implies as time itself seems to conspire
against Jake making changes in it).

King's style, which includes setting the scene through intensive use of brand-names, references specifics of the everyday to serve as mundane contrast to the horrors he writes about. It was something adopted by the so-called 'dirty realists' in the mainstream, who used the specifics of working-class life in America as a sort of horror trope to contrast with the safety of their middle-class academic life. I was therefore on the alert for anachronisms in 11.22.63, and spotted only a couple, the most telling being a reference to George Of The Jungle, a Jay Ward cartoon that didn't air until 1967. Being old sometimes has its advantages--but perhaps time itself was just messing with King or me.

Of course, the fabric
of time is more fragile than either Jake or Al realise. There is a
character whom they encounter as they go through the portal, whom I
was convinced was Jake himself, in an ultimate time paradox, but
turns out not to be when the final twists of fate are revealed. But
King makes much of the butterfly effect, of causality, particularly in relation to
JFK—his scenario of the future had Kennedy survived is one of the
more fascinating parts of the book.

The Oswald story,
however, is not very satisfying. King follows the Warren Report,
Gerald Posner, Norman Mailer path, in characterising Oswald as a
maladjusted, wife-beating, glory-seeker. That Mailer himself called
Posner 'only intermittently reliable' doesn't seem to bother King, and
of course, Oswald as part of a conspiracy would complicate his plot
beyond measure; Jake could hardly go back in time to stop a
multi-shooter assassination.

And King's
characterisation of Oswald and Marina serves as an interesting
counterpoint to Jake's courtship of Sadie, his fellow schoolteacher
in the past. It also provides an explanation, albeit a thin one, of why George
DeMohrenschildt and his white-Russian friends in Dallas might have
befriended the supposed leftist Oswald—because of his wife, and
despite him. Though DeMohrenschild seems to be amused by this version of Oswald, and this hints at a problem.

DeMohrenschildt is the
lynch-pin of King's plot—Al tells Jake he needs to determine if
George is the man behind Oswald's attempt on the right-wing Gen.
Edwin Walker; if he wasn't then Oswald truly is a lone crazed
assassin. The problem is, even in King's scenario, DeMohrenschildt
seems more involved in that plot than not. And in reality, his apparent suicide
just before Gaeton Fonzi was to interview him on behalf of the House
Assassinations investigation (the 'suicide Bill O'Reilly claimed to have heard from DeMohrenschild's front porch, which was a neat trick as it was proven O'Reilly was in Flordia at that time) remains as suspicious as Johnny
Roselli's dismembered body being found floating in a gas drum in
Miami, just before his recall for a second round of testimony before
the same committee.

For King, the question
seems to be more about Kennedy, and us, than about Oswald. Do we
believe that Kennedy's death ended some sort of Camelot, and do we
need to believe that death was not a mere random act, by a willful
malcontent? In trying to answer those questions through time-travel
King actually confuses the issues, because time itself seems to be
acting as if it trying to preserve the act we consider random—in
other words, it is a kind of predestination-- and the Camelot we may
think ended with JFK turns out to be better in many ways than the
world he might have left behind had he completed his presidency. That
is a paradox which renders King's own scenario of the assassination
itself less important than the way time impacts on the lives of his
characters, and what they are and are not able to overcome as people.
So the final reveal, the wider scope of history, and the ultimate denouement, all feel rushed in relation to what's gone before. The bigger future shouldn't be a shadow of the assassination's becoming a narrower concern, but it's a broader one too. It's ultimately not very satisfying as a look at that assassination, though it makes
for an entertaining, if overblown, Twilight
Zone time travel story.

Friday, 21 June 2013

There is a moment,
watching the home movies of Tricia Nixon's wedding, when I wondered
what similar Super 8 footage of Sonny Corleone's marriage might
reveal. Our Nixon, which shows tomorrow at London's Open City Docs
Fest, is built around home movie footage shot by H.R. 'Bob' Haldeman,
John Ehrlichman, and Dwight Chapin, three of President Richard
Nixon's closest aides, three of his most loyal and devoted followers,
all of whom would wind up in jail, cut loose by their hero on his way
to becoming the only American president to quit in office.

The footage provides
behind the scenes looks at some of Nixon's biggest moments, including
the China visit, and his most important speeches. Context is set by
clips from network newscasts, and by post-prison interviews with the
three home movie makers. When I reviewed Nixon's Shadow, a
book about his image (you can link to that review here), I asked
whether, in Doonesbury's words, a new generation would recoil as they
ought to, and now the same question holds true. But here the answer is
more ambiguous.

The answer is that the
footage is so infused with the adulation of the cameramen that it's
almost hard to realise what is going on. Worryingly, I even found myself admiring
Tricia, something I never did when I was young. My feeling was that
viewers who were not there would not feel the almost visceral impact
of Nixon on the times, and it is impossible for the documentary
makers to summon that up from the past. Still there are surprises,
the biggest one for me being a small protest by two of the Ray
Conniff Singers when they performed at the White House. This was the
'square' music Nixon preferred, and the tiny banner of protest, and
the heartfelt Christian plea they make for peace does more to set
Nixon and Co. into context than any news reports.

Two things help make
Penny Lane's carefully structured film work for an audience to whom
Nixon is a blank slate, or worse, pace his posthumous re-evaluation,
a statesman. One is the personality of the three aides, who are so
obviously out of step with their own and our time as to exude
mistrust even as they try to appear ingratiating. These are frat
boys, squares themselves, Greg Marmalard and Doug Neidemeyer from
Animal House gone from frat house to White House. It was Dwight
Chapin's frat buddy Donald Segretti whose 'dirty tricks' on the 1972
election campaign got Chapin dumped, but also allowed the press a
chance to ignore the bigger issues of government spying and
malfeasance.

That took place under
Ehrlichman, who was in charge of putting together the 'plumbers' unit,
designed to counter White House leaks. Ehrlichman post-prison is
easily the most engaging of the three: one of the real highlights of
the film is a commercial he made, and which was quickly
withdrawn, for ice cream. He says it's 'unbelieveably good' and then
smirks 'and believe me, I'm an expert on that subject'. Stay through
the credits to see it.

Haldeman was truest of
true believers, cast as Martin Borman by his critics, all brush
cut and Rumsfeldian arrogance. He gives an interview about his
children calling his hair out of fashion, and, like his boss, admits
he is. In his most telling quote, he speaks of their arriving in
Washington with 'no great ideological thrust or noble ambition'. Once
out of prison, he's rocking a carefully styled 70s do, but it doesn't
change him at all. He still denies the truths the Watergate tapes
reveal, that he as chief of staff was engineering a major cover-up,
and unlike Ehrlichman, who doesn't seem surprised he never spoke with
Nixon again, Haldeman seems hurt by his abandonment by the Tricky One.. You almost feel sorry for him. You feel
even more sorry for his wife, who shows up in a few shots, always
looking like a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

The second thing that
helps us understand is a series of taped conversations which
sometimes reflect on the footage already shown. The last of these,
when an obviously drunken Nixon calls Haldeman after the speech
announcing his and Ehrlichman's 'resignations', is telling. Nixon curses what
he's done, but also asks Haldeman, whom he's just cut loose, to call round to get reactions to
how his speech went for him. We've previously heard both his need for
approval and Haldeman's unwavering willingness to provide that. And
we still can't shake the feeling, as we do when we hear Alexander
Butterfield explain to Nixon how the recording devices work, and
Nixon saying 'there may be a day we have to have this' that Nixon,
even drunkenly, was speaking for a record, double-accounting for
posterity.

There's a fascinating
discussion as Nixon, and Ehrlichman deconstruct a TV show they can't
identify, but is All In The Family, the American version of Til Death
Do Us Part, and how it glorifies homosexuality. Nixon takes the lead:
'You don't glorify homosexuality on public television. You know what
happened to the Greeks. Homosexuality destroyed them. Aristotle was a
homo, we all know that. So was Socrates.' 'But he never had the
influence television has,' adds Ehrlichman. 'The last six Roman
emperors were fags,' Nixon begins, and Ehrlichman cuts him off with
an explanation of 'fatal liberality' that Haldeman finally cuts
short. Speaking of that, the discussions of Henry Kissinger, his
duplicity, and his penchant for pillow talk, are fascinating.
Haldeman later explains that Nixon feels it's OK for Kissinger to 'be
a swinger in New York, Florida, or California, but he should not be
in Washington.' He advises 'not to put him next to the most glamorous
gal anymore, but to seat him next to some intelligent and interesting
woman instead.' This was the White House in 1971.

Along the way there are other amusing cameos and side views. Ehrlichman's camera reveals in
great detail the bidet in an ornate Paris hotel bathroom. Daniel
Moynihan pops up in the foreground as Nixon's helicopter takes off.
John Kerry speaks on behalf of Vietnam Veterans Against The War
during the March on Washington; this is the footage that the 21st
century equivalent of Nixon's frat boys, Shrub Bush and Karl Rove,
would use against him relentlessly 40 years later. When Nixon
complains no one's called to congratulate him on a speech, and
Haldeman says Nelson Rockefeller has, Nixon says 'well, the hell with
him!'. And there's celebrity TV interviewer Barbara Walters,
interviewing Haldeman, and carefully grimacing when he says history
will judge Nixon as one of the great presidents; the grimace, of
course, filmed later as a reverse.

But most important are
the glimpses of the real Nixon, whose gloating at the press reaction
to his announcement of peace with North Vietnam, a peace that never
arrived, is a masterpiece of hypocrisy. This is what I grew up
knowing, instinctively about Nixon, and what Our Nixon allows a new
generation to acquire at its own pace, and learn, as mine did, to
recoil.

When
I wrote about the Danish film A Hijacking I suggested that the
theme of business ethics and its relation to social morality was part
of many recent Scandinavian films, among them Exit. In A
Hijacking the conflict was between a businessman's social
responsibility to the crew of his vessel and his ingrained desire to
'win' the negotiation. As it happened, I had just seen Exit
earlier the same day at the Nordicana festival, and though the two
films weren't part of a double-feature, the connection was obvious.

Exit
begins Mads Mikklesen explaining, in voice-over, how negotiating
is all about knowing your opponent's weakness, and that every
opponent has one. The movie opens with Mikklesen, as Thomas
Skepphult, and his partner in a firm called Nova Investment forcing
out the man whose family's firm it had been, because he has done
something that crossed their ethical boundary while completing a
deal with another firm. The ousted man, Morgan Nordenstrole, goes
back to his office and blows his head off with a shotgun.

Seven
years later, Nova is trying to exit that deal, and cash in
their profits, but another investor, the super slick Gabriel Mork,
holds them to ransom on theexit. At the same time, Thomas' mentor and
partner, Wilhelm, announces he wants to retire, and shows Thomas a
hidden compartment in his safe, in which is a tape which Thomas
believed had been destroyed. That night, Wilhelm is murdered, and
because his death would save Thomas millions on the price of buying
him out, Thomas becomes the top suspect and is arrested. But while
trying to contact his lawyer, someone else gets on the line, and
Thomas realises he's been set up, and nothing is as it seems.

On
the one hand, Exit is a complicated, sometimes repetitive,
innocent man on the run film, in the tradition of Tell No One or
Headhunters, and it wouldn't surprise me if it hadn't hadn't
provided some inspiration for Jo Nesbo's tale. As with the Harlan
Coben novel (and the French film) Thomas is lucky to have a
professional to call upon for help, in his case a cousin who is some
sort of security operative, and helped also by the insane
incompetence of the Swedish police. Detective Malm, played with a
wonderful sneer of suspicion by Ia Langhammer, has decided the case
from the first, and after that point, no amount of killing, shooting,
fire, or kidnap can distract the cops' attention. Which is great if
you're an accused murderer on the run. Especially one played by
Mikklesen, who is fast becoming the most sado-masochistic character
in movies: public-school boy perverse torturing James Bond (and
getting his come-uppins, so to speak) in Casino Royale,
getting beaten to a pulp more here than in The Hunt, bloodier
than Valhalla Rising.

It
also never seems to occur to the police to see whether Thomas is
still running his business, which he is trying to do using his
assistant Fabian von Klerking as a go-between. Eventually Fabian
(Alexander Skarsgard) has to go to Mork (whose name, at least in
English, suggests murk and angel at the same time; John Rabaeus,
playing him, is excellent, and looks a bit like a classier version of
William Forsythe) and Mork, it turns out, did the nasty to Fabian's
father. But he overcomes his distaste out of loyalty to Thomas, and
this impresses Mork. It also suggests that there is something about
the aristocracy, the old Sweden, as signaled by Fabian, that is not
only worth admiring but has been lost. Although I was wondering if
the burned out 'P' in the 'Prince' sign in the inevitable seedy bar
Thomas is forced to visit was some sort of comment on the Swedish
royal family.

As I said, the
plot involves some repetition (here review imitates life), and a good deal of twisting. Thomas
repeats the same sort of gambit a few times, and indeed there are
two escapes via powerboat, which is stretching it for any movie not
set in Hong Kong. Questions of loyalty and trust are paramount, from
Wilhelm's wife Louise, to Thomas' own wife Anna (played with some
relish by Kirsti Eline Torhaug). Samuel Froler is excellent as the
psychopathic villain, and even better is his henchman Ahmed (Hassan
Brijay) who might have walked out of one of the Pusher films

Which
is one of the strongest points of Exit. At times it has that
grainy darkness of 70s American crime films, and which the Pusher
films share, but it is also very carefully one of the most noirish
films to come from the sadly misnamed Nordic Noir pantheon. It is
exceedingly dark and shadowy, and for most of the film the only light
comes in scenes set in Thomas' home, where the sunlight streams in
over water and through picture windows. But mostly it takes place in
places where natural light never shines, or at night, or both, and
that sets the mood. When the film reaches its visceral climax, it's
full-scale Fall of the House Of Usher, which I found symbolic.
Director Peter Lindmark has a nice visual command which helps give
depth to what otherwise would be just a pacy thriller with a few too
many longeurs. And when the ultimate betrayal is revealed in the
final twist, it too is a shadowy picture in a reflection of a dark
room. It doesn't get more noirish than that.

Exit is available on DVD from Arrow Films on 8 July

Note: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

Thursday, 20 June 2013

James Gandolfini wasn't just cast perfectly as Tony Soprano, he inhabited the role. He was Jersey-born, Rutgers-educated, New York-trained. Those New Yorkish roots were true of most of the Sopranos cast--born in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Mount Vernon, Hoboken. Dominic Chiasnese, Tony Sirico, Vincent Pastore, David Proval, Jerry Adler, even Frank Vincent, all felt real as Jersey mobsters. Gandolfini worked as Tony because he felt real too, but there was something else there, an extra bit of shadow, an ingratiating appearance, that meant the audience could believe in him both as a gangster and as David Chace's character.

Tony could be a softie and mean it, and then order Big Pussy killed. He could then dream-talk to Pussy, through the mouth of a dead fish, and it was believable. The show was based on Tony's being just slightly off the mould. He once called himself a 260-pound Woody Allen, and that's what came through as Tony. Plus, although there are any number of Wesleyan references in the show, I always figured it was Gandolfini who got Mangenius into Arties for dinner.

Where this worked best was possibily with Nancy Marchand, as his mother. Marchand (born in Buffalo, which might as well be Wisconsin in New York terms) was Tony's Italian Jewish mother, and if their interaction sometimes veered between classic Greek drama and every sitcom on TV since the 1950s, she had the same kind of slightly hidden special thing that brought out the real Tony. It works with Edie Falco (another New Yorker) partly because she works to escape the mould as well.

I still think Gandolfini's role as Bear in Get Shorty may be his best (though lots of people like Virgil, in True Romance, which may have got him cast as Bear anyway). It's fascinating to see how far he came from that part to the Sopranos, but also how he didn't go much farther. He's excellent in any number of films, but it's always in the same sort of supporting role, as a blustry figure of crude authority: the CIA boss in Zero Dark 30, the general in In The Loop (playing straight man for a Brit, no less); the mayor (and best thing) in the remake of Taking of Pelham 123 (he made Travolta look handsomer in five different movies--supposedly Gandolfini was voted best-looking in his high school class, which really lets you know all you need to about New Jersey); and as Robert Redford's punching bag in The Last Castle. He relies the same mannerisms he employed as Tony, the twinkle in ther eye, the look of surprise, the knowing tilt, but on the big screen they were less effective. It was as the anti-hero on the small screen that Gandolfini worked best.

It made a huge impact. The Sopranos marks a turning point in TV drama--the creative energy moved to cable TV, and deeper darker series and more ambitious films were the result. Without the success of the Sopranos there might not be a Mad Men, or Justified, or Breaking Bad. On the other hand, there might not be a Lilyhammer either. But Gandolfini didn't let it rest there. He was a producer on three HBO films; as executive producer and presenter of Alive Day Memories, about soldiers returning from Iraq, as producer of the Prism-award winning War Torn, about the psychological damage of combat, and again as a producer on Philip Kaufman's Hemingway and Gellhorn, with Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen epically miscast as ill-matched writers.

If you can find it, go back and watch Showtime's 1997 made for TV version of 12 Angry Men (which went back to Reginald Rose's original teleplay). It's a good cast, with Jack Lemmon in the Fonda role, George C Scott as Lee J Cobb, Ossie Davis, Hume Cronyn, William Petersen, and Gandolfini as Juror 6 -- the Edward Binns part in the movie made 40 years before. He nails it, and he moe than holds his own in an excellent cast. And it reminds you of what talent in New York is like. We saw the cast of the Sopranos in Scorsese films, in episodes of Law & Order, maybe in theatre if we were lucky enough. But read this article from the 1988 New York Times, about when Gandolfini was doing the thing generations of actors had done before him. He found his unlikely success, playing a Jersey character, and every time you heard that music play, and watch Tony Soprano and his car and cigar drive up to that exit, count yourself lucky you are watching. RIP.

Monday, 17 June 2013

Writer/director Tobias
Lindhom signals his intentions right at the beginning of his powerful
A Hijacking, shown as part of the Nordicana festival. It's the story of a Danish merchant ship taken by Somali
pirates in the Indian Ocean. The film actually opens with Peter C
Ludvigsen, the CEO of the shipping company called into a meeting with
a Japanese firm they are looking to buy. They want to spend less than
$15 million; the Japanese are holding firm at $21m. We see Ludvigsen
begin his negotiations; then we see him afterwards, the deal done for
$14.5m. And soon after, he is called out of a meeting to learn about
the hijacking.

In this country,
reviewers praised the lack of a 'Hollywood' hijacking, as if by not
being Under Siege European films were automatically superior. You might be forgiven for expecting that, given the film's UK poster, but
having assured themselves this wasn't Steven Seagle, they seemed to assume the movie was some sort of docu-drama, and paid
little attention to its opening and the thrust that it portends, and continues.
This is crucial, because A Hijacking (an odd mistranslation, since
the Danish title, Kapringen, would be THE Hijacking--but Lindholm himself explained in Sight & Sound that they chose to translate with the indefinite article to distinguish themselves from 'the action genre' and to 'signal objectivity', which obviously cued the British critical response. It's good value from one indefinite article!) belongs firmly in
the tradition of films like Inheritance, Exit, or even
Headhunters; films in which the demands of big business challenge the
concept of personal ethics within the traditional societal morality
of Scandinavia. Its Danish poster makes that clear, and, in this sense, A Hijacking is really two films, one
dealing with the prisoners' dilemma, and the other with the
negotiation.

The prisoners' story
(we see only the three white prisoners, the other four are kept
separately, which we must assume is an interesting bit of Somalian
racial profiling) is one of fear, uncertainty, and claustrophobia.
Lindholm's first feature film, R, was a prison drama (which I have
not yet seen, but now will!) which also starred Pilou Asbaek, who
will be familiar to Borgen viewers, and who is absolutely excellent
in his roller-coaster emotional ride as the ship's cook Mikkel—indeed,
it is a small act of relief for him at film's end which turns out to
have tragic results. Most telling is his relation with his
captors—there is a scene where he and crewmate Jan catch a plaice,
and it almost appears a form of Stockholm Syndrome, call it
Copenhagen Syndrome, is in the offing.

This turns out to be
false however. The hijackers live through the power of the gun, and
Asbaek turns out to be manipulated even more cynically by Omar
(Abdihakin Asger), their negotiator, as we see they are by the
shipping company back home.

That is because this is
a negotiation, and thus a personal battle for Peter and for Omar too. Peter's played with
great inward control by Soren Malling, and his assistant Lars by Dar
Salin. They too are veterans of Borgen, which should not be
surprising because Lindholm was a writer on that show (he also
co-scripted The Hunt, which I still see as an Oscar nominee in 2014, read my London Film Festival review here)
and one of the key themes of Borgen is the area where ego, where
personal motivation, leeches into the demands of the business of
politics.

Peter, and his company,
make a great show to the families of their crew of caring about the
safety of the men. At first, we can ascribe the hard-line they take
with the Somalis to the outside expert they've called in, named
Connor Julian and played by Gary Skjoldmose Porter, who's a steroided
and tattooed guy with an Australian accent and a Berkeley T shirt.
The point is he isn't Danish.

But we soon see that
Peter has gone into his own negotiation mode, and this becomes, in a
sense a personal battle. Not just with Omar—conducted over ship to
shore radio, which heightens the tension but keeps the focus on each
man individually—but with himself, and perhaps his instincts.
Julian is there to help keep him from getting emotional over his men,
but Peter actually needs little help to forget that. His mantra is
that negotiating involves 'knowing the opposition', but the reality
is he knows little about them. What he does know is Omar is another
negotiator, and the men are his only leverage.

As the days mount up,
indicated by captions which seem to increase geometrically, the
pressure grows, and the key scene comes from Peter's wife visits him
in his office. He's been separated from her almost as fully as Mikkel
has from his wife. She wakes him on his office couch and we see he is
sleeping in a sleeveless T-shirt, the same uniform Mikkel wears. He
is vulnerable, but he dresses in his suit in the same way warriors
don armour, and by the time he is fully dressed he has gone into
warrior mode, and he sends his wife away brutally.

The deal is finally
done, not without tragedy, and Mikkel is reunited with his wife and
daughter in a spare office room, a touching scene which plays out the
difficulty of his return to his former world. Meanwhile, Peter,
having handled the difficult duty of notifying a family of a death,
finally leaves the offices. The film's last shot is of the garage
doors closing down, like prison gates. The question is whether Peter
has escaped his own prison of business and negotiation, or whether is he always going to be
captive there.

A Hijacking is on general release

NOTE: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

Friday, 14 June 2013

Walt Whitman is a
great place to start any examination of the Beat poets. Ginsberg
acknowledges his debt explicitly in his wonderful “A Supermarket in
California”. The
liberating flow of Whitman's American free verse influenced Ginsberg even more than his status as an emerging 19th century gay icon, but
there was also a sense, that carries through in Ginsberg, of Whitman's importance as a putative man of the streets, constantly out
among the public, engaged with and writing about ordinary people, to the extent of
his visiting Civil War battlefields where he comforted the wounded boys.
Sadly, given such a good starting point, Cherkowski’s idea of “man of the streets” may be more an image
of a proto-hippie Walt cruising the docks for willing sailors. But love beads were never a part of Whitman’s accessorizing, not even when his
hair was long.

Actually, Whitman
might be a role model for Cherkowski himself, because this book could easily have been subtitled “Song of Myself”. It's a kind of Neeli in Wonderland, as it
were, and sometimes this preoccupation with self is downright
hilarious. Cherkowski tells us Ginsberg’s first words on meeting him were
“You’re fat”, and Neeli riposted “You’re old”. He then
reports, deadpan, “Things were never smooth between us after that”.
Johnson shat on Boswell from far greater heights without
creating undue bumps in their relationship!

The high point of
Neeli’s life appears to be when his own poetry is praised by some
youngsters who mistake him, in his beads and buttons, for Ginsberg himself, or maybe
when he beats the great man at Trivial Pursuit, which turns out to be
one of Ginsberg’s favourite pastimes, if not a metaphor for Beat poetry.

It might just be a metaphor for this book however, for it really is a Beatnik Trivial Pursuit game
between covers. We know the Beats have been turned into an industry, a marketing concept if not gimmick, and there
is a lot of mileage in constantly recreating a neighbourhood tour of
San Francisco in the late 50s, or the Village in the 60s. Hell,
Michael McClure (one of the 12 poets discussed here), always adept
at riding the waves toward the next celebrity or grant, once wrote a
book called Scratching The Beat Surface. That seems deep by
Neeli’s standards.

As a critic, Neeli
is a fine tour guide.He makes no bones in refusing to make judgements about Harold Norse, who deserves close examination, not least for his influence. But when I wrote Norse's obit back in 2009, I mentioned it was hard not to make him sound like a literary Zelig to the Beats, and I wonder if that is a role which might have been inherited. Neeli gets overcome by the faux
sentimentality of Jack Micheline, just gives up and lets it all wash
over him. When he’s asked to review John Wieners’ Selected Poems, he’s again simply overcome with feelings, yet actually his take on this
unjustly neglected poet is probably the best chapter in the book. And its
nice to see attention paid again to people like Philip Lamantia.

Otherwise, there is
far better stuff out there on the major subjects: Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti,
Bukowski. Neeli says Buk “didn’t buy the Eisenhower 50s, didn’t
buy the Kennedy 60s” but misses the point: that was when Buk did his
best writing, and when Buk did buy into the Reagan 80s, he lurched
into self-parody. Of course, self-parody is a staple of the Beats,
and Gregory Corso’s ever-inventive riffs are the other highlight
here. Corso tells him: “I’m the elder now. A daddy. You who do
so love the Gregory got the goodie gumdrops from me.” It sounds like the sort of thing Corso might say. Then Neeli,
calling him a pied piper, marches off with Corso through the streets
of North Beach, reminding me of nothing as much as a happy Boswell.

The other link to
Whitman, which Neeli ignores, is that Walt was a major league mama’s
boy, sleeping at the foot of her bed long into adulthood. This problematic close relationship with mothers is a
theme that runs through the Beat poets, most notably Ginsberg and Kerouac. And so
with Neeli. When he takes 250 mils of bad acid in 1978 what does he do?
He calls mom, and she advises him to find Lawrence Ferlinghetti! Which despite the tripping he does, but by the time he does Ferlinghetti is sitting in a café reading the New York Times. Far out!
Maybe Neeli’s Mom could have drawn him a map, and perhaps Neeli would have got us to Ferlinghetti sometime before disco became king.

Whitman's Wild Children: Portraits of 12 Poets

by Neeli Cherkowski

Steerforth Press (South Royalton, Vermont) 1999

ISBN 9781883642860 $18 (UK£12.00)

NOTE: A somewhat different version of this review appeared in Headpress 20.

Tuesday, 11 June 2013

Everybody Has A Plan is
a powerful gothic noir tale of two brothers who grew up in the Tigre
Delta of Argentina. Agustin has left his past behind, becoming a
children's doctor in Buenos Aires, where he seems to be drifting out
of his life, his marriage, and his very existence. He sits alone in
their flat, the gulf widening between him and his wife, played with
great outward chill and inward anger by Soledad Villamil. Pedro is
the brother who stayed behind, to live a life of crimes both petty
and serious (including kidnapping) and living for the day, the
traditional getting by of the Delta natives, often at the expense of
the Buenos Aires-type weekend and summer people. But when Pedro
discovers he has incurable cancer, he decides to visit his
long-estranged brother.

The visit has a simple
reason; Pedro is terminal, and wants his brother's help in
terminating his life. And when he dies, Agustin, whose relationship
to his own life is terminal, leaves his brother's body behind in the
tub, and goes back to the house where he grew up, pretending to be
Pedro. As his wife will say to him, when he is briefly in jail, and
she realises what has happened, 'you would rather be in prison than
be yourself with your wife', which defines the kind of prison in
which Agustin sees himself.

Viggo Mortensen, who
spoke Spanish as a child in Argentina, plays both brothers, but of
course here there is an added twist, as he is playing one brother
playing the other. It's a brilliant performance, full of the
uncertainties that define Agustin in relation to his past, a past he
is incapable of escaping. More than that, by assuming Pedro's
identity, he also assumes Pedro's choices. Agustin might enjoy the
life of a simple honey-maker, Pedro's erstwhile occupation—and you
might see it as the choice between the mind and the body, the id and
the ego, but it creates for Agustin a responsibility as much as a
freedom. Agustin has, in his mind, been living for other people's
expectations, their dreams, while Pedro lives only for himself.

Because Pedro has been
involved with some serious crimes, Agustin falls into the world of
their childhood friend, Adrian, played with psychopathic relish and
Johnny Hallyday-ish charm by Daniel Fanego. Adrian senses the change,
recalling the brother whom he felt unequipped to survive in their
environment, and makes the most of it. Also sensing the change is
Rosa (Sofia Gala Castiglione), the young woman who is seemingly
trapped in Adrian's web, or in the Delta world he, as a force of
evil, represents. This is another prison, and Rosa soon becomes the
person who has the ultimate plan, which is to simply leave it all
behind. We realise this is not what Agustin has done; he has left one
part of himself and returned to another, but he has not found a new,
total self at all. And perhaps there is no room for change. It isn't really a plan at all, and throughout the movie, no one's plans seem to bear fruit. But as Mike Tyson famously said, 'everybody has a plan, until they get punched in the face.'

Writer/director Ana Piterbarg's first
feature is a noirish gem of character study that moves at a slow
pace, the rhythm of the Delta, as it were. It's a slow burn, a
build-up to the violence that has been implicit throughout the film,
implicit in the Delta, which is shot with great creativity by Lucio
Bonelli, combining beauty and threat, and always with a sense of
confinment, whether is the apartment, the prison cell, or the Delta
itself.

Mortensen, of course,
can act in three languages, and the Tigre Delta is the same sort of
evocative and ominous setting that the Louisiana bayou would be, when
this film is remade in the States. Of course Mortensen won't be the
star, but it will hard for anyone to match this performance, and along with The Hunt this has to be in the running for Crime Time's best foreign crime film of 2013.

Everybody Has A Plan is on release now

note: this review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

NOTE: In the summer of 1999, Mickey Spillane arrived in London to be honoured by the late lamented Crime Scene festival at the NFT. He had just flown in from South Carolina, via Charlotte, that morning, and his BBC handler wanted to make sure I understood I had 45 minutes with Mickey, who was, after all, in his 80s. Then he would rest before taking a taxi to Broadcasting House for another interview. After 45 minutes, Mickey shooed the handler away, and I ran out of tape as we continued talking until, literally, he was being pushed into the taxi cab.Caspar Llewellyn-Smith ran what follows, my short version of the interview, in the Daily Telegraph that Saturday--I later transcribed the whole thing for Crime Time, and maybe I'll post that here sometime too; it's worth it!

I, THE JURY, Mickey
Spillane’s 1947 best seller, boasts the most infamous ending in
hard-boiled fiction. Mike Hammer knows the woman he loves has
murdered his best friend. She is seducing him with a strip tease.
She’s also reaching for a gun behind her back. Hammer plugs her in
her naked belly with a slug from his .45.

How c-could you?"
she gaspedI had only a
moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in."It was easy,"
I said.

Eat your heart out,
Quentin Tarantino. More than 50 years after writing those words, the
king of pulp fictions is in London. Spillane's 81 years old, but his
handshake could still crush a hoodlum’s trigger finger. He will
deliver a Guardian Lecture tonight to keynote a season of crime films
at the National Film Theatre, which includes the debut of a Spillane
documentary directed by award-winning crime writer Max Allan Collins.
"He was savaged by the critics," says Collins, "so
Mickey developed this persona, entertainer and pitchman."

And how.
Interviewing Mickey is like saddling a bronco who refuses to be
broken, and knows all the cowpunchers’ tricks. Ask about critics
and he’ll tell you about interpreting between Salvador Dali and
Jimmy Durante, who were both speaking English, more or less. Ask
about politics and he’ll tell you about being shot from a circus
cannon. There's no slowing down. And he’s still answering the
inevitable questions about Mike Hammer’s violence with laughter.

"I tell them,
you know why Mike shot that woman in the belly? He missed!"

Nowadays the
violence of so-called neo-noir is high fashion, while Spillane’s
has become somehow declasse. On its 50th anniversary, I THE JURY
went out of print in America for the first time. Mickey’s
surprised to learn he’s coming back into print in the UK with
Robinson Publishing’s HARDBOILED: A MIKE HAMMER OMNIBUS, released
to coincide with his visit. (Note: You can find my essay on the two Hammer omnibuses here).

"Corporate
turnovers," he shrugs. "They thought I’m old and passe.
I tell them I’m not an author, I’m a writer. I’m a
merchandiser. I did Miller Lite commercials for 19 years on TV. The
Mike Hammer TV series has been brought back for the fourth time.
People know me, they stop me on the street."

In the adverts,
Spillane, in trench coat and fedora, played himself as Mike Hammer
with enough ironic humour to launch a thousand Tarantinos. "Hey,
Mickey, got a Lite?" "Sure thing doll." The series
featured many of America’s most famous sportsmen, but he was the
star, the one they all looked up to. Spillane, like John Wayne (who
gave him a treasured vintage Jaguar as a reward for some script
doctoring) was what American men aspired to be. "Things
change," he sighs. Well, almost sighs. "The Blue Ribbon’s
gone in New York. We have no leaders to admire, all we’ve got is that
cocksman in the White House"

Spillane isn’t
crazy about any of the Mike Hammer films either. The first, I THE
JURY, was made by Victor Saville in 1953. Its NFT showing will be its first British showing in its original 3D format, and with the 20
minutes of cuts by the censors restored. But Spillane has never seen it
all the way through.

"I went once
in Brooklyn. Biff Elliott walks on screen and says "I’m Mike
Hammer," and a voice in the audience howled ‘DAT’S Mike
Hammuh?’ I walked out." He laughs again. "Victor
wanted to make an epic, THE SILVER CHALICE, which fell on its face
with a deathly thud. So to save money he gets this slob writer, and
he rooned it! They have Mike getting knocked out with a wooden coat
hanger!"

Ten years later,
Spillane was cast as his own hero. Can you imagine Raymond Chandler
playing Philip Marlowe? Mickey looks at stills from THE GIRL
HUNTERS. "Good grief, did I ever look like that? There’s
Shirley Eaton. What a pro; no ego, she just played the character and
made me look good." The filming was done in Britain, where he
palled around with gangsters like Billy Hills and Jack Spot. "When
we needed a .45 for Mike, Billy brought a sack full of guns to the
set, with live ammo."

The best-regarded
Hammer adaptation is Robert Aldrich’s KISS ME DEADLY, which ends in
nuclear holocaust. Mickey hates it. "They never even READ my
book!" Aldrich saw an apocalyptic strain in Hammer, and critics
have recently tried to connect that to Spillane’s faith. He’s a
Jehovah’s Witness, but the critics got it wrong. "It’s not
the end of the world we witness," he says, "but parousia,
the coming of the peace of God, the end of the system of things as
they are. It’s taking in knowledge."

But confounding the
critics is his favourite pastime. "It tears them up. I had
seven books at once in the top ten best seller list. I said ‘you’re
lucky I don’t write three more!'"

He’s written two
children’s books. The first, THE DAY THE SEA ROLLED BACK, won the
Junior Literary Guild Award. "I keep winning these crazy
prizes," he shrugs. "It meant the book sells to
libraries." And he’s still
writing.

"I’m halfway
through a new Mike Hammer novel," he says. "But I used to
write fast…now my rear end gets tired. I’m not full of piss and
vinegar any more. The vinegar’s all gone." He wrote I, THE
JURY in nine days, originally plotting it as a comic book starring
"Mike Danger". The book revolutionised the publishing
industry.

"I knew it
would be a hit. Paperback reprints were huge during the war, and I
saw a market for originals. All those soldiers coming back. A
little sex wouldn’t hurt, and they’d seen violence. I got a
comic distributor to guarantee a paperback reprint, got a $1,000
advance from Dutton for the hardcover." Soon the only books
outselling Spillane were the Bible and Dr. Spock. "I’ve gone
downhill ever since," he laughs.

Spillane has a
radio interview next. He’s been talking for two hours; I’ve
long since run out of tape. Across the room in the Savoy, a
business meeting has ground to a halt, eavesdropping on Mickey’s
spiel. After he leaves, they ask, "who was that?"

Monday, 10 June 2013

Note: this essay originally appeared as my twelfth American Eye column
at Shots, in January 2009. I originally posted on this site a link to the piece, but the link no longer functions, hence my reprinting it now. But it prompted a spirited exchange with Max Allan Collins, which you can find with the original post here.

HEROES NEVER DIE

It's always sad to mark
the passing of an era, and even sadder when you're reminded of
another you'd marked already. This essay is dedicated to
two giants of the field, which makes it appropriate that one of the
books discussed is The Goliath Bone, the first of a number of Mike
Hammer manuscripts Mickey Spillane left behind and which Max Allan
Collins has completed. And at the end of January, less than a month
after Donald Westlake's sudden death on New Year's Eve, Richard
Stark's latest, and I suppose last, Parker novel, Dirty Money
appears. It occurs to me you could argue that all the Parker books
were begun by Westlake, and finished by Stark from Westlake's notes.

At one point in Dirty
Money, the police release an artist's sketch which deliberately makes
Parker kinder and softer, exactly what I mentioned when Westlake
revived Stark and Parker in 1998 (was it really that long ago?). Kinder and gentler? Parker and Claire actually stay in a Berkshires
B&B surrounded by leaf peepers, and Parker manages to blend in,
as far as that goes. The subject of Parker
aging never comes up, although his attitude toward Claire is somewhat
less prehistoric than it was in the first series of books. He doesn't
seem to have aged because Parker was never really a child of his
time, or any time, but there is one problem: modern technology,
surveillance, communications, forensics, have certainly made the life
of the professional criminal more difficult.

The story picks up
where Ask The Parrot left off, but the botched heist happened two
books ago, in Nobody Runs Forever. I am convinced Westlake intended
this story to be on-going, from book to book, for just as long as he
could manage. Raymond Chandler once wrote that whenever your plotting
gets stuck, have someone with a gun come in the room, Westlake has
refined that dictum; the characters may or may not have guns, but
they almost always have or can discover larcenous motives—double
cross has always been the central theme of the Parker books. Parker
is looking to collect cash he left behind in a church, and all sorts
of people, from a tough-talking lesbian bounty-hunter to a hapless
wanna-be true crime writer, are getting involved, and most of them
are looking to take some of the dough, or all of it. They are
introduced and described with such care, as are others, like the real
Tony Soprano, New Jersey crime boss Frank Meany, or the Massachusetts
state trooper Gwen Reversia, that you're certain they were destined
to appear again. My feeling is that Parker's anonymity would continue
to be compromised, book by book, until Westlake reached the point he
couldn't write Parker out of. Things always came back to haunt
Parker; if his life were easy, it would never have been fun to write
about. Or to read. So I'm sad that my dream of Parker's Last Stand
will never come about.

According to Mickey
Spillane, there could never be a last stand for Mike Hammer, because 'see, heroes never die.
John Wayne isn't dead. Elvis isn't dead...you can't kill a hero'. He
said it to me when I interviewed him, he said it on stage the next
night at the NFT, and I'm sure he said it a million more times. And
it's true, but only to a point. The Duke didn't die, of course, but he went out
perfectly before that death, in The Shootist. Even earlier he'd had the luxury of
working his way through a host of different valedictory performances,
among them The Cowboys (very good) True Grit (good) and McQ (not so
good) before he and Don Siegel made their small classic.

Mike Hammer had no such
luck; he's been out of print for a long time, consigned to being
a relic of his era; Hammer is firmly entrench-coated into immediate
postwar America, he's one of the best representations of the era's
unconscious drives, and even though he moved reasonably well into the
sixties, the ferocious drive and energy wasn't there; the times had
changed (and so, in fairness, had Mickey). Mickey left
six Hammer manuscripts in different stages of completion, and The
Goliath Bone was the most fully finished, but it's also the most
risky with which to launch a Hammer revival, because it's set in post
9/11 New York, thus taking Mike Hammer as far as possible out of own
times and into a time warp.

Face it: Hammer has to
be in his eighties by the time the jets crash into the World Trade
towers. For the story's purposes, he's played as if in his late
fifties or early sixties, I'd guess, and he's actually planning on
making Velda an honest woman at long last, but it never jells. That's
because it's not your disbelief you're being asked to suspend, but
your belief, in the character Mickey created, and in the writing he
did when he was young and hungry. The writing here, whether it's
Mickeys or Max's, just doesn't have the same intensity; it's too
knowing. The thing that made Kiss Me Deadly work so well as a film
was that Robert Aldrich and Buzz Bezzerides recognised the primal
drives that Hammer represented; they felt the energy in the prose,
the manic power of the character. That's gone now; this Mike Hammer
is far closer to Mickey doing his Miller Lite ads, or telling his
fantastic stories; Stacy Keach could play this story in the TV series
without too much problem; hell, Mickey might even be able to play it
himself, in his 80s. But as Hammer fiction it just doesn't take off.

Not that they don't
try. As Velda says, at one point, Mike is taking on, literally, the
whole damn world, and the David and Goliath metaphor isn't lost on
anyone. This is just before they actually do get married, and Mike
turns down a hell of a seduction attempt on the eve of his wedding;
this is a kinder gentler Mike Hammer too. Well kinder, maybe. And there
are plenty of jokes about relics.

But even as the plot
gets going, it winds up depending on his trusty .45 being not so
trusty after all. The biggest twist is, if you know the Hammer
novels, pretty obvious, and though it's fun, it just isn't the same
thing. At one point, Pat Chambers, Hammer's long-time buddy, police
foil, and longer-after Velda, says 'nothing lasts forever, Mike'.
Velda tells him 'a relic is in the past, Mike'. That contradicts
Mickey, who said that heroes never die, but they're both right.
Heroes live forever, but they live in the worlds in which they are
heroes, and they aren't always such heroes in other worlds.
Apparently, some of the other unfinished Hammer novels are period
pieces, and some take Hammer through the decades. I'll look forward
to seeing what Mickey and Max do with Hammer in the world where he
belongs.

The good thing about
Complex 90 is that it reads like vintage Mickey Spillane,
which shouldn't be a surprise, as Max Allan Collins, who has finished the book for Mickey, explains in the
introduction. The title had once been announced for publication in
the early Sixties, and Mickey gave him a partial manuscript to
safeguard. It's set in 1964, with a new president in Washington and a
new leader in Moscow, and Mike Hammer is hired as a bodyguard to
accompany a straight-shooting (in the non Hammer sense) Republican
senator to Russia, after helping said Senator survive an
assassination attempt that killed his primary bodyguard. The novel
opens with Hammer having got himself back to America after escaping
from a Russian jail, and leaving a trail of (coincidentally enough)
45 Commies behind, meaning he's now an international incident.

Hammer then tells the
first part of the story to the panel of US intelligence bigwigs, in
flashback. This is always a dangerous thing, because you'd think he'd
edit a few of the more lubricious details out of what he says (as
opposed to what he tells us, the readers). This is the best pure
Hammer in the book; his prison break is fast action set up by his
hard-boiled resistance to his captors. As I said, vintage stuff.

Back in America, the
question becomes why the Russians went after Hammer with such zeal. A
question of revenge, against him and/or Velda, his former secretary
and, as it turns out, an agent of the same top secret agency that
employs Hammer? Or is there some other motive? Hammer investigates,
Russians try to kill him, and he must beware of the motives of people
who may appear to be friends, or, as always with Mike, potential
lovers.

The story moves
quickly, moved by its actions, as you expect from Spillane at his
best. It's denouement is somewhat complicated, relying on an awful
lot of engineering complicated plots which don't always seem
necessary, and there's far more time spent on Hammer's head-butting
with authority, establishing his own freedom to use his own methods,
than there is on fleshing out (so to speak) some of the characters
who are potentially villains. So when the truth is revealed, it's
nowhere near as much shock as it ought to be.

My problem with the
book is that this isn't a vintage of Hammer of which I'm particularly fond, although I
thought The Big Bang, another of Mickey's posthumous collaborations
with Max, set in 1965, was superb in many ways (you can read my review here). I remember liking The Girl Hunters (1961), but in
Complex 90 the concept of Mike and Velda as secret agents gets
carried to retrospective extremes—going back to the OSS during WWII
for Velda—and Sixties spy excess. If the agency Mike and Velda work
for really is so secret, why is Hammer carrying its ID around in his
wallet, and how would anyone else know what the ID meant? I know this
was the era of James Bond and Matt Helm and Man from UNCLE, but
Mickey had Tiger Mann, and to me Mike Hammer is far more interesting
as a private eye than a secret agent, especially since a good portion
of his secret agency, as I mentioned, involves him arguing his bosses
into letting him be a private eye. Call me conservative (which is
what a Mike Hammer fan ought to be).

There is also an
interesting private scene with Velda, which details her torture when
she was trapped behind the Iron Curtain on a mission, which ends with
something less than tender, but does go a long way into explaining
why Mike and Velda never felt the need to marry—an issue in
21st-century set Goliath Bone. When I reviewed that book, it prompted
a spirited exchange with Max Collins about what he called my
'distressingly literal' take on the book—and you can find that
exchange here. I'm also going to reprint the original Shots review,
as it doesn't seem to be up at their website any longer. And post the
Telegraph version of my 1999 interview with Mickey. Meanwhile,
enjoy...

Complex 90 by Mickey Spillane and
Max Alan Collins

Titan Books £17.99
ISBN 9780857684660

Note: This review, in slightly different form, will also appear atCrime Time www.crimetime.co.uk

Sunday, 9 June 2013

I was hoping to write Deacon Jones' obit for one of the papers, but he wasn't really a concern for British audiences, so I wrote this instead, aimed not at an audience that had never heard of the Deacon, or did not comprehend American football, but one that does.

Great sportsmen leave
legacies of definition. Some are so dominant they redefine the game,
forcing changes in the rules. Basketball devised goaltending,
offensive goaltending, widened the lane, and banned the dunk to
neutralise big men, like Bob Kurland, George Mikan, Bill Russell,
Wilt Chamberlain, and Lew Alcindor, when their opponents could not.
Lords made rules to restrict fast bowling after Thompson and Lillie
and the great West Indies attacks of the late 70s.

Greats often have
signature moves, even outside pro wrestling. Deacon's was the head
slap. He didn't invent the head slap, but as he famously said,
'Rembrandt didn't invent paint'. He was so devastating smashing his
open hand over the ear-hole of opponents' helmets that the NFL banned
the move ('hands to the face'), which was still being coached in high
school and college when I played, the celebrated 'ringing his bell'.

And finally, greats are
often defined by their nicknames, different ways of capturing their
greatness which eclipse their given names. The true greats often have
more than one, and some of them are the kind of definers
sportswriters used to make up in the pre-Chris Berman days. Think of
'Babe' Ruth, the Bambino, the Sultan of Swat. Deacon Jones, who has
died aged 74, is one of those rare sportsmen who qualifies in both
those categories, but more than that, he also defined his own
dominance so perfectly, his definition sticks as part of gridiron
football's jargon. 'Deacon' gave himself that name, which has a
threatening, grave-side feel to it, because he didn't want to be just
another David Jones. If he hadn't, in LA he might have been mistaken
for one of the Monkees. But the press also termed him 'the Secretary
of Defense' when he went to Washington.

Starring for the Los
Angeles Rams' defensive line known collectively as 'The Fearsome
Foursome', Deacon specialised in turning the drop-back pass into
hazardous duty for quarterbacks. As he explained: 'you take all the
offensive linemen and put them in a burlap bag, and then you take a
baseball bat and beat on the bag. You're sacking them, you're bagging
them. And that's what you're doing with a quarterback.' The term
'sack' was born, but it took nearly 20 years before it became an
official statistic in 1982.

Which is a shame,
because if anyone had been counting sacks while Deacon was busy
accumulating and defining them, his legacy might well be even greater, if that's possible.
There have been attempts to go back and count sacks, post quarterback
mortem if you will, but its a haphazard business without actual film:
you can't reconstruct a sack from the box score, like baseball
historians did when they retroactively counted saves by pitchers who
saved games before the concept or the stat even existed. The
consensus seems to be that Deacon had two seasons, 1964 and 1968, of
22 sacks each, which would be the NFL record if anyone had been
counting, and if Michael Strahan's bogus sack on Brett Favre's
lie-down were removed from history as it should be. Some historians
give him 26 sacks in 1967 (he was the NFL's defensive player of the
year in both 67 and 68). Coy Bacon is sometimes also credited with 26
sacks in 1976, but in both cases other recounts have lowered the
figure. Deacon's unofficial total of 194, including that 26, would
still rank third all-time.

Deacon's path to the
NFL was not easy. He was expelled from South Carolina State, a black
university, for participating in civil rights protests, and wound up
at Mississippi Vocational College (now Mississippi Valley State)
another segregated institution, but one well off the scouting
circuit. The story is Rams scouts saw him on film, while watching for
someone else, and noticed a 270 pound lineman running down pass
receivers. They drafted him in the 14th round.

He joined a Rams team
that had a decade earlier been the NFL's most exciting and glamorous,
but was struggling. He joined veteran Lamar Lundy to form a good pair
of defensive ends. Coach Bob Waterfield would soon be replaced by
Harland Svare, and the Rams drafted Merlin Olsen with their first
pick in 1962, and he made an immediate impact at tackle. In 1963
Svare traded for his former Giants' teammate Rosey Grier and the
Fearsome Foursome was complete.

Historians will show
there were other references to defensive lines being called 'Fearsome
Foursomes', including one Grier played on, and Svare played behind,
in New York. But the label had been placed on the AFL's Chargers the
year they moved from LA to San Diego, 1961, when the now sadly
overlooked Earl Faison joined Ernie Ladd, Bill Hudson, and Ron Nery.
Maybe the LA press stole the name from San Diego, but when George
Allen arrived as head coach in 1966, he turned the defense loose, and
the Rams' fortunes around.

In Allen's second year,
1967, the Rams lost only one game in the season, finishing 11-1-2.
But they had to travel to Milwaukee to play Green Bay (9-4-1) for the
conference playoff, where they lost decisively to the Packers, which
set up the Ice Bowl the following week in Green Bay. Having the play
on the road was unfortunate, but Green Bay matched up well against
the Rams; in the regular season's final game the Rams had just
squeaked past the Pack despite sacking Bart Starr six times. The
Packers had probably the league's best offensive line, and they used
fullback Chuck Mercein to help; Starr was sacked only once in
Milwaukee while Willie Davis and the Packers got to Roman Gabriel six
times, which blew a hole in the Rams' accusations that the Packers
softened the Milwaukee field to slow them down. I can recall the
Packers suggesting that the Fearsome Foursome were controllable, just
as they thought they could handle Dallas' D, led by Bob Lilly.

The Rams might have
fallen short of the big prize, but Jones and the Rams captured the
hearts of LA, if such things exist in LA, and took advantage of the
media opportunities that attention created. Olsen became a successful
actor, Jones was a successful singer, did quite a bit of acting and was a frequent pitchman,
most famously for Lite beer, and Greir did a bit, as well as becoming
an aide to Bobby Kennedy; he was at his side when RFK was killed.
Deacon's self-promoting wasn't as flashy as Joe Namaths, but it was
always backed up with results—he is a significant figure in the
development of modern sportsmen.

Deacon played with the
Rams between 1961-71, two years for the Chargers, and 1974 when he
was reuinted with Allen at the Redskins. That's Allen, in the photo above, presenting Jones when he was inducted into the Hall Of Fame; when Allen went in, posthumously, in 2002, it was Jones whom the family asked to present him.

Jones was All-Pro, unanimously,
every year between 1965-69, and second team three other times. He
went to seven straight Pro Bowls with the Rams, and another with the
Chargers. He was an automatic choice for the 75th
anniversary all-time NFL team picked in 1994. His individual
dominance is hard to assess partly because of the flair with which he
accomplished it, and partly because of the hype, but whenever I look
at all-time teams, and get into the argument of could these guys play
in the modern game, where everyone is bigger and stronger, I point to
Jones, a 270 pound end with strength, quickness, and an arsenal of
pass-rush weapons, and say 'he could'.

Saturday, 8 June 2013

My obit of Father Greeley, the priest and prolific writer, is online at the Guardian (link here) and might well be in the paper paper on Monday. Father Greeley was a fascinating character--someone who might have stepped from a Warner Bros. movie in the Thirties (Angels With Dirty Faces?) played by Pat O'Brien. It was a cliche he played to the hilt in Chicago, with his column in the Sun-Times and his very high-profile rooting for Chicago's teams. Interesting chose the Cubs over the White Sox.

I was tempted to try to do a comparison with Greeley and the Berrigans--the most telling point being that for all his criticism of the Catholic church, Greeley never left it. Indeed, despite being an advocate of reform influenced (at least it seemed to me) by liberation theology, Greeley also was a firm believer in many Catholic traditions, foremost among them parochial education and celibacy for priests. My sense is his politics moved further to the left as society moved further toward the right, toward greater inequality, and greater worship of Mammon. Although, as a best-selling author, he himself did live well.

And best selling he was--though his high sales in later years were more a factor of his prodigious output. I can't say I've ever paid much attention to his fiction, which seems both formulaic and also a vehicle for his examining issues which concerned him. I was serious, however, in praising his sociological work on Catholocism, and I would be very curious to read his book on the ascension of Pope Benedict, not least to see what his personal reaction was, but primarily to get an insider/outsider view of the politics involved. I can't believe he was happy when Benedict claimed child-abuse was a product of 'normal behaviour' in the licensentious 70s. In that context, though, I read an interesting essay Greeley wrote on the legacy of Pope John Paul II (you can find that here) and it made me wonder if Greeley ever thought of fictionialising the conspiracy theories around the death of John Paul I (either that he was murdered or that he died while in bed with a nun). Just a thought. If Greeley already had that thought and wrote a novel about it, please let me know.

Thursday, 6 June 2013

It was with some sadness and some bittersweet nostalgia I heard the news of Tom Sharpe's death, and I wonder now why more isn't be made of the career of this great comic novelist.

Looking back, I suppose I might have been foreshadowing my own life, but when I lived in Montreal in 1975-76, I was addicted to Tom Sharpe novels. I can't remember now if I discovered them there, perhaps through my English girlfriend, or if I had already been reading them, but I do know I found quite a few of them in The Word bookstore, the Pan editions whose covers were as chaotically attractive as the books, and I do know they were laugh-aloud funny, especially in the middle of French Canada. But one thing for certain, is that I came to Britain from Montreal half-expecting it to be a comic paradise reflecting Sharpe's writing, and finding myself only barely half wrong.

Once in the green and blessed land, however, my attachement to Sharpe soon faded. Some of it was his own losing some edge--after all, the underlying savagery of the satire in the early books was always going to be diffifcult to draw upon--and some of it was my realising the the reality of living in this country was almost as satirical as satire itself. Sharp often adopted a Colonel Blimpish persona, but when in the writing you begin to feel the hand of Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells, you might well turn elsewhere.

As if to illustrate the point, it always intrigued me that Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure, his first two books, both of which were set in South Africa, weren't anywhere near as respected in this country as, say, Wilt, Blott On The Landscape, or Porterhouse Blue (not to diminish either of those books, which deserve their comparisons with Wodehouse and Waugh). But the South African books have a much more cutting satire behind them, as befits Sharpe's own experience in the country (and indeed as the child of a British fascist father and a South African mother).

I think, however, that he was hugely influential. I don't think Malcolm Bradbury's academic satires would be half as funny without Sharpe's influence, for example. Bradbury did the adaptation for the excellent TV version of Porterhouse Blue, and you can see the Ian Richardson House Of Cards set-up taking place right before your eyes. Sharpe was anarcghic, and could write slapstick, which is a very hard thing to do well--you have to create characters who are both real and absurd, and you have to maintain enoughh sympathy for the the audience to anticipate what's coming, and regret it as well as laugh at it. He was a master of that.Trying to think of who has come along since Sharpe, I can't really come up with an equivalent, though in sf both Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchet might be considered in the vein. I wonder if it's because self-satire has become too facile a vein to mine--or perhaps because there's so much of it about. Sharpe's best work, to an outsider, cut to the bone. But to the Brits themselves, it simply reinforced the sense of a pleasant eccentricity, which in the end would ensure everything continued as it always had. So Sharpe became a sort of 'national treasure' as the modern term goes. But at his peak, I think Tom Sharpe suggested something different--and the power of his humour came from that.